The Basil Programming Language

println "Welcome to Basil!"

def greetings = ["Hello" "Nice to meet you" "Salutations"]

def greet name? greeting? =
    println greeting + ", " + name + "!"

println "What's your name?"
greet (read String) greetings[1]

_{For more examples, see the example/ directory located in this project's root!}

Basil is a fast and flexible language for expressing complex problems in natural terms without compromising readability, simplicity, or performance.

Featuring...*

• A novel context-sensitive parser that allows seamless manipulation of language syntax.
• Homoiconicity, supporting Lisp-style metaprogramming via quotations and eval.
• A "first-class everything" approach - Basil has no keywords, and almost no rigid syntax, so even primitive types and operations can be extended and manipulated.
• A static, structural type system that permits expressive type-level programming.
• Evaluation is compile-time by default, with the compiler capable of evaluating arbitrary Basil code.
• Partial evaluation allows the compiler to "lower" expensive or effectful code, compiling it to efficient native code instead of evaluating it ahead-of-time.
• Our home-grown compiler backend compiles Basil code quickly, and applies competitive optimizations.
• Finally, the whole compiler and runtime fits in under a megabyte and depends only on libc.

_{*Note: Basil is highly WIP! The language is unstable, and these claims may or may not apply on all platforms or for all applications.}

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Installation

Currently, we only support building the Basil compiler from source. You'll need a C++17-conformant C++ compiler, a Python 2.7 or Python 3 interpreter, and maybe a bit of resourcefulness...

$ git clone https://github.com/basilTeam/basil
$ ./build.py --help             # lists all build options (compiler to use, additional flags, etc)
$ ./build.py basil-release
$ bin/basil help

Basil's language runtime can be compiled separately, as either a statically or dynamically linked library.

$ ./build.py librt-static       # to build a statically-linked library
$ ./build.py librt-dynamic      # to build a dynamically-linked library

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Supported Platforms

Operating Systems:

• Linux
• Windows
• MacOS

Architectures:

• x86_64
• AArch64
• RISC-V
• LLVM
• WASM

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License

Basil is distributed under the 3-Clause BSD License. See LICENSE for details.